


Liberalia

by gin_eater



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M, Florence Arc, Murder Kink, Mythology References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-11 15:54:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16478507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: This was up very briefly, but something about it felt over-hasty and I wasn't altogether satisfied with it, so I reworked a few things, made it longer, added some polish, etc.A vignette on the nature of Hannibal and Bedelia's relationship, and what I see as her becoming. Set immediately after the participation/observation conversation in Antipasto.





	Liberalia

**Author's Note:**

> "A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne."  
> \--Friedrich Nietzsche

His fingers, she thinks, must have snagged on the frayed edges of her own person suit, because she can feel herself coming apart at the seams, shedding her skin alongside her coat. What lies beneath is raw and pink and pulsing, as though she's lost a layer of her soul -- gnawed it off, perhaps, like a leg in a trap (like a limb between teeth, like her fist down Neal Frank's throat and the watermark of his blood stretching up to her elbow in mimicry of a red satin opera glove).

"Oh, Bedelia," Hannibal murmurs. "What have you gotten yourself into?"

Bedelia blinks rapidly, tipping tears down her cheeks. Her head is buzzing and her legs feel weak, shaky as a suckling fawn. It was a poet, she remembers, eyes flickering briefly toward the body near the door, who flew the curtain of Hell and led Dante down its deep and savage road.

She tries to speak, breath hitching. She feels like Cinderella on the cusp of being slippered, about to be betrothed to someone she'd once shared a dance with, but fled before having exchanged names; someone she looks at daily in the mirror bolted to the back of her vanity, whose magic had withdrawn at midnight, and left her amputating pieces of her own psychic feet in a desperate bid to fit back inside the rigid toe boxes of the pair of pointe shoes in which she'd been dancing _manèges_ around her own shadow for decades.

Hannibal watches her, waiting, unwilling to interrupt. Ever the gentleman, he offers her his hand so that she may steady herself, a barre for balance in these early movements, while the first words of her second coming locate their marks on the stage of her tongue.

" _From fell to fell,_ " she quotes, " _descended downward then…_ "

" _...between the thick hair,_ " he replies, " _and the frozen crust._ " He lifts her hand to press his lips against her wedding ring, then intertwines his fingers with hers. "From Fell to Fell," he says again, and in this moment, it sounds like a vow. "Our _f_ _elix culpa._ "

"From Fell to Fell," Bedelia repeats, "our fortunate fall."

And fall she does, for him and into him, sinking slowly in the circle of his arms as he carefully buoys her down to the floor. She has the sense that she is forgiven for the façade of her betrayal -- not of him, but of herself.

"What would you have me do, Bedelia?" he'd asked her, having allowed their dinner guest to elude the snaphaunce of his jaws -- an earnest question, despite its rhetorical tone, that had prompted her to confront her own disappointment and, in orchestrating Dimmond's demise, even from behind a pretense of reluctance, to ameliorate his own. Things always go best if she is perfectly honest with him, after all. If influence inherently implies interference, it is a fool's errand to attempt to detach the muse's culpability from the artist's. The sculptor may have freed her from the marble, but the madness is the maenad's own.

It is her way, to shy twice before biting back -- a restraint he lacks, for all the iron control he exercises in every other aspect of his life -- and he has always had more faith in her abilities than she; had recognized, long before she did, that their walls are of a height with one another, and that the reason she thought she could never climb his was simply a mistake of looking up for the rungs of a ladder, when she should have looked over, to where his outstretched arm had been waiting all the while to guide her courteously across the narrow chasm between them.

Bedelia reaches for his face, cups his cheeks in her hands. The prominent bones there fit snugly in the hollows of her palms, filling the space where a prayer might be spoken.

She doesn't even realize she's drawing him in until his lips close over her own, but it is she, this time, who passes first through the divide and inside of him, penetrating, tasting, running the tip of her tongue over the delicate web beneath his. She hears him inhale sharply through his nose, knows he's scenting the tapestry of the skin beneath her skin, the fine muslin of her desire embroidered with small flowers of fear.

She whimpers when his hand slips beneath her skirt, between her thighs, and cants her hips to meet his finger's summoning gesture against the peach silk moiré masking the cleft of her cunt. Her own fingers scrabble for his belt, for the zip of his trousers, and she can't figure out whether she's surprised or not to find him already hard when she takes him in hand. His cock twitches heavily at her touch, a low hum of pleasure escaping his generous mouth as she tugs and teases him from root to tip.

With no further fanfare, he lifts her up and deposits her into the paradoxical security of his lap, pulling her panties to one side like the removal of a virgin's veil. In a movement smooth as the back of a scalpel, he's inside of her, and her nails are thorns in his scalp and his deftly powerful hands bruise her flesh like an abductive Bernini as he raises and rolls her in slow, deliberate waves, the steadily swelling tempo of her own internal sea change. His breath is hot and swift against the front of her throat and through the silk of her blouse as he mouths at her breasts, his teeth at her nipple barely blunted by the lace of her brassière. It is an appropriate impropriety, Bedelia thinks, that at their most naked, they make love clothed -- the echo and evolution of their therapy, seated now so closely that, truly, one of them ends where the other begins.

She arches back, face and eyes turning, Madonna-like, to the body of Anthony Dimmond on the floor, and there's a rush low in her belly like falling, a frisson of panic that opens underneath her like a trap door. She feels inverted, inside-out: there's a yearning in her stomach and a nausea between her thighs, and her gag is swallowed in the first spasms of her climax as Hannibal gathers her flush against him, hungry to feel every chimerical paroxysm of revulsion and revelation, the obscene ecstasy of a saint riding the tongue of God. It is as gratifying as it is terrible, this  _pièce de résistance_ of their _pas de folie à deux._

He strokes her back in the aftermath, strokes her spine as he would her throat to coax six seeds into staying down, hissing wordless sounds of solace against the shell of her ear, and Bedelia understands now that this is the part of her of which Hannibal feels the most protective, the part of her he would kill to preserve. That's what she would be, she imagines -- preserves, some redcurrant play on words, peaches and pomegranates and pairing well with loin. She wonders if it's a sign that she's hysterical, that the notion of being thus sheltered within him does not distress her as much as rationality would dictate it ought. She laughs, and he thumbs the tears from her cheeks with a smile.

Hannibal's eyes are darkly tender, beatific and proud. He runs his fingers through the spun gold of her hair; later, when they come forth to rebehold the stars, he will point out the constellation of Ariadne's diadem in the Florentine sky. Mistress of his Labyrinth, the only person cunning enough to deny the Minotaur its meal. Acorns and oysters, Bedelia realizes, can feed more than one breed of horned beast between courses. Her head is buzzing, but not with flies.

Hannibal was mistaken about Will Graham. Two sides of the same coin, no matter how lonely, are cursed to always be looking in opposite directions.

Two halves of the same riddle, on the other hand, will find the answer they seek only in their acknowledgement and acceptance of one another.

_Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet._

This is her gnosis, the orgiastic rite of her Dionysian rebirth. Her husband is madness, and theatre, and wine. He smells of figs and fennel, and the pardic musk of a spotted pelt that both diverts attention and draws the eye.

She is the honey in his lion.

And her hive is ready, now, to swarm.

**Author's Note:**

> Hannibal and Bedelia quote, of course, the Inferno, specifically a bit of Canto XXXIV, where Vergil and Dante climb down Lucifer's body in the Ninth Level of Hell. To "rebehold the stars" is from the same. "Smooth as the back of a scalpel" is a play on "smooth as the back of a razor," coined by George Du Maurier, Daphne's father. The riddle is Samson's, from the Book of Judges.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
